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Tom Steyer: Hedge Fund Billionaire's Foray Into Politics

Along the way Steyer helped Jim build two nonprofits, Children Now, which focuses on children’s health and education, and Common Sense Media, which guides parents on keeping children safe on the Internet.

Steyer tiptoed into politics, largely by writing checks. In the 2004 presidential campaign he was among the top five donors to John Kerry and served as a delegate to the Democratic Convention. (In the 2008 election he first backed Hillary Clinton and later Barack Obama, for whom he was also a donor and fundraiser.)

On the night of John Kerry’s defeat in November 2004 Steyer was moved to do something more. “We were worried about the way the country was going,” he says. He decided to create a community bank with the idea of putting investment dollars in poor communities. Through a foundation he gave $25 million to start One California Bank in Oakland. Last year he funded One California’s purchase of the northwestern arm of Shorebank for roughly $20 million and merged the two to form One Pacific Coast Bank. It’s currently got some 480 loans outstanding; the average loan is $340,000.

His focus on the environment emerged a couple years ago. “Every time I looked up I thought, It’s inescapable,” he says. “It’s unpleasant. But actually this is something we can do a lot about.”

In 2009 Steyer and Taylor gave $40 million to Stanford University (where Steyer is a trustee) to start the TomKat Center for Sustainable Energy; they followed in 2010 with a $7 million gift to create the Steyer Taylor Center for Energy Finance & Policy. Then in early September this year they gave another $25 million to help open Yale’s Energy Sciences Institute, which will research renewable fuels. He is also beginning to create regional “energy innovation clusters” of investors, academics, clean energy companies and large corporations to help drive new technology and its adoption as well as enabling public policy. The first, in Ohio, was set to launch in mid-September.

Steyer hits the road regularly to preach the benefits of clean energy and jobs. In July, at the invitation of Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, he talked before a satellite group of the U.S. Conference of Mayors held in Los Angeles. Jokes Steyer: “I was like a rock star, but the audience was all 50-year-old men.” In mid-August he spent four hours with California legislators in Sacramento one day, then flew the next to Colorado for an Aspen Institute conference on renewable energy, where he received an award for his Prop. 23 work.

In early September Steyer and his brother launched the Center for the Next Generation, a nonprofit that will develop public education projects to support clean energy, and will push for more investment in children’s health and education. Tom Steyer has committed $15 million.

He also put a relatively small amount of money, around $15 million, into green tech companies through venture capital firm Greener Capital, run by Charlie Finney. “As I like to say,” Steyer explains, “if you want to pay attention to a horse race, put two dollars on a horse and you’ll pay enormous attention to all 11 horses in the race.”

Is Steyer bound for political office? When I ask about a rumor that he might run for the U.S. Senate (Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s term is up in 2013, and she’s 78), he laughs and says, “Let me just say, I can’t imagine a worse job.” Yeah, but would he ever consider running for office? He responds in diplomatic language: “I would like to make a positive contribution. I am less interested in what happens to me.”

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